Survival Guide: An Upward Turn

As you start to adjust to the imminent end – now just three days away – your life should become calmer and more organized. You are in the upward turn. (That was quick!) Your physical symptoms lessen, and your depression begins to lift slightly. The closing of Mozart’s La Nozze di Figaro just might be, as artist Ragnar Kjartansson suggests, the most beautiful minutes of music ever recorded. Put it on a loop and listen again and again. Phone 167Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is an absolute treasure, combining sophisticated story-telling with joyous detail and wit. I guess my point is, we’ll eat tonight, and we’ll eat together. And even in this not particularly flattering light, you are without a doubt the five and a half most wonderful wild animals I’ve ever met in my life. So let’s raise our boxes – to our survival. mrfoxThe Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is also something to behold. It’s short and lovely and there’s pictures too. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.princeIt’s time to get out there and do something active. Ride a bike, go for a walk or a swim, do anything but a run. That’s bad for your knees and hips.

The Final Image

I have come to the end of the third draft of my novel, My Bad Side. I’m happy with it, I suppose, but the ending is still not complete. It’s an important aspect, a frozen final moment for the reader. It needs to have substance; it has to be worth getting to. And yet it can’t be packed too tight; that just makes it trite and ridiculous. Anyway, this is essentially what I have right now:

Well, there isn’t a boot, but there is a deserted beach, and it’s cold. The feeling is right in this image; it’s bleak – with tinges of blue, green and red – but it needs more, uh, Totoro wonder…

more Ursula sexuality…

more Mr. Fox furry, uh, fury……

…a sort of half naked cartoony world , I guess, but  cold…sort of like this…

But more…ahh! I’m still working on it! I’ll figure it out yet.